Red-hot summer job market awaits U.S. teens as employers sweat

WASHINGTON – Mary Jane Riva, CEO of the Pizza Factory, has a cautionary message for her customers this summer: Prepare to wait longer for your Hawaiian pie or calzone.

The Pizza Factory’s 100 West Coast locations are desperately short of workers.

With about 12 employees per store, they’re barely half-staffed – just when many more Americans are venturing out to restaurant chains like hers.

“The days of 15-minute orders,” Riva said, “may not be happening anymore.”

Talk to other employers in America’s vast hospitality sector – hotels, restaurants, public pools, ice cream parlors, pick-your-own strawberry farms – and you’ll hear a similar lament.

They can’t fill many of their summer jobs because the number of open positions far exceeds the number of people willing and able to fill them – even at increased wages.

Some help may be coming: School’s out for summer, cutting loose millions of high school and college students for the next three months.

Riva, for one, is hoping to field more job applications from students seeking summertime spending money.

Teens are in an unusually commanding position – at least those among them who want a job.

Researchers at Drexel University’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy predicted in a report last month that an average of 33% of youths ages 16 to 19 will be employed each month from June through August this year, the highest such rate since 34% in the summer of 2007.

Among them is Samuel Castillo, a 19-year-old four-year veteran of Miami’s Summer Jobs Connect program who’s already built an impressive resume.

In one former job with the program, he worked in a legislative office, registering constituent complaints. His first summer, he saved $900 to buy parts to build his own computer.

Now, he’s studying computer engineering technology in college and working in the Jobs Connect program again this summer, earning $15 an hour teaching other students how to manage money.

“The goal for working is to pay my bills,” he said. “School costs money. Books cost money.”

Likewise, Lara Beckius, a junior at Connecticut College, said she went from being stressed out about finding a summer job to being stressed out about choosing among multiple offers.

In the end, Beckius settled on an internship at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine.

After several offers arrived within a week, she frantically sought advice from others and searched on Google for a courteous way to turn down job offers.

“It was a little crazy,” said Beckius, a 19-year-old from Avon, Connecticut. “It went from, ‘Am I going to have something this summer?’ to having four opportunities and, ‘Which one am I going to take?’ ”

This year, for the first time in a couple of years, employers might get more help from overseas.

After restricting immigration as a COVID-19 precaution, the government is beginning to loosen up: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has raised the limit on H-2B temporary work permits – used for seasonal work – by 35,000 visas.

Cape Resorts, which operates several boutique hotels, cottages and restaurants in Cape May and elsewhere in New Jersey and New York, will employ about 120 international students this summer on J-1 visas, work permits that also serve as a kind of cultural exchange program.

The company employs about 950 staffers.

“Finding staff that are eager to fill hospitality roles remains a challenge,” said Cindy D’Aoust, a company executive. “But it is great to see the return of our international students as well as returning college students for the summer season.”

Still, today’s level of teen employment isn’t close to what it used to be.

In August 1978, 50% of America’s teenagers were working.

Around 2000, teenage employment went into a decadelong slide.

In June 2010, during the agonizingly slow recovery from the 2007-2009 Great Recession, teenage employment bottomed at 25% before slowly rising again as the economy recovered.